On sequential selection and a first passage problem for the Poisson process

Abstract

This note is motivated by connections between the online and offline problems of selecting a possibly long subsequence from a Poisson-paced sequence of uniform marks under either a monotonicity or a sum constraint. The offline problem with the sum constraint amounts to counting the Poisson arrivals before their total exceeds a certain level. A precise asymptotics for the mean count is obtained by coupling with a nonlinear pure birth process.